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Miranda
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The Believer By Neill Raymond
The man's boots were in mud almost up over the tops. Each time he took a step he nearly pulled them off. He had to take the steps though, because he was working. And mud and rain could not stop him or nothing would ever get done... and nobody would eat right. What he did was important and he had to get it done. There were five acres of vegetable gardens and an orchard here and he was the man in charge. No matter, he loved this hard life. The more it hurt the more he loved it and that love sometimes seemed to take him right from the very core of creation along those boundless currents of the universe to the swung-open gates of heaven. With every spade full of heavy dirt, every handful of seed or basket full of apples his mind would soar like an unstrung kite and think those thoughts that made creation so sweet. He was a man in love with all things, because it seemed all things looked back at him and felt the same way. He knew a long time ago that he had to (what some call), "come to terms with life,"; open up to it. And to learn to not keep anything from passing through, like a clear flowing stream down from the mountains, else the headwaters jam up with deadfall and you never reach the sea. Hate keeps things in. He knew that well enough. He, as all men, had to learn that lesson too. Sometimes in the silence he would look back, until a tear would spill out and burn before he could fight it back. But everyone has a spring of tears. To him life had refined him, maybe like a woman would change a man if he loved her. And those times that bring the tears now, were what made him want to love. It was cooler now as the evening approached and the sudden sunset across the horizon lit dimly over the coastal mountains for a moment like some sprawling beauty. Even through the hard work, the sweat cooled and made the man shiver. The shovelfulls were heavier now both from the long hours and the long years. Sometimes doubts came. Oh! how he longed to be sure again, as he once was. Maybe like Adam was in that place so long ago, the time before he fell. "Adam was young then", the man thought, they both must have been around the same age: Adam and this man, they were both young and stupid. The world was his oyster too. It was the darkness that made him think about these things: the darkness and the cold. He remembered his fall. He remembered how the sky seemed to close over him and gave him a desperate feeling of claustrophobia and the acute panic of feeling the absence of God. And the descent was to be further still. The man filled the wheelbarrow with his tools and bent low to push through the mud. The man was strong from years of hard work and before that the fields of play and of war. A big man, he pushed surely through the mud, and headed toward the barn. "Judas died, but Peter cried," he thought. Which one was he? There were years he gave no thought to God until that night he dipped his foot in the River Styx and saw clearly that ancient monster stirring. True horror pierced him that night. And he saw from where only God might deliver him. It took him years (sometimes he counted them) to put distance between him and that place, so long ago. Even now sometimes that vision would come a-haunting and the man would sag perceptively, even without a load. Books, there are books where he lives, hundreds of them, and he has read them all, but nothing in them was ever so true as that night so long ago. Free of the mud and on the hard road to the barn the man cleaned and hung up his tools and then walked in silence with his brothers , as the monastery's clear bell began ringing for vespers, as it has done for a thousand years.
Neill Raymond's fiction has also appeared in Femme Soul |